Send Me To Mars With Party Supplies Before Next August 5th

With No Warning, House Republicans Vote to Gut Independent Ethics Office

The move by emboldened Republicans on the eve of a new Congress would strip power and independence from an investigative body and give lawmakers control over ethics inquiries.

Wow. 

The move to effectively kill the Office of Congressional Ethics was not made public until late Monday, when Representative Robert W. Goodlatte, Republican of Virginia and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, announced that the House Republican Conference had approved the change. There was no advance notice or debate on the measure.

The surprising vote came on the eve of the start of a new session of Congress, where emboldened Republicans are ready to push an ambitious agenda on everything from health care to infrastructure, issues that will be the subject of intense lobbying from corporate interests. The House Republicans’ move would take away both power and independence from an investigative body, and give lawmakers more control over internal inquiries.

It also came on the eve of a historic shift in power in Washington, where Republicans control both houses of Congress and where a wealthy businessman with myriad potential conflicts of interest is preparing to move into the White House.

[…]

“This is huge,” said Mr. Morgan, who now defends lawmakers targeted in ethics investigations. “It effectively allows the committee to shut down any independent investigation into member misconduct.“

I’ll be honest, my dream is to be a medical officer for a space company/organization

Seven Vehicles That Will Carry Humanity Into Orbit and Beyond Very Soon

The human race is quickly becoming a spacefaring civilization. During the Cold War, aggression and technological rivalry between two superpowers led to humanity’s first journey into space and to those first footsteps on the Moon. Today, exploration is driven by competition in the commercial space industry.

Private companies like SpaceX, Boeing, and Sierra Nevada Corp are already signed up to carry cargo to the International Space Station. Later, they’ll also build and fly their own human-capable spacecraft, while NASA itself focuses on building a vehicle that will eventually take humans to Mars. Read more about each spacecraft.

They are (from top to bottom):

1.) NASA’s Orion Spacecraft 

First crewed launch 2021-2023

2.) SpaceX’s Crew Dragon

 First crewed flight 2017

3.) Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner 

First Crewed Flight: 2018

4.) Sierra Nevada’s Dream Chaser

First flight: 2019

5.) Blue Origin’s New Shepard

First Crewed Flight: 2018

6.) World View Capsule

First Crewed Launch: 2017

7.) Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo

Launch date: Unknown

Also for ballroom! It’s fine for collegiate comps, but I’d love to compete at other ones as well

Petition to Eliminate Gender Discrimination in West Coast Swing Competitions

We, the undersigned, respectfully request that all event directors, clubs, and national organizations including, but not limited to, NASDE and the WSDC, eliminate gender discrimination in all local, national, and international West Coast Swing dance competitions and acknowledge points and placements awarded to competitors regardless of gender. Kelly Casanova, WSDC# 124

Please sign and share! Because everyone should be able to have their rightfully earned points count no matter what they choose to identify as. Also, fuck institutionalized heteronormativity.

USADance (and I’m assuming the national organizations for other countries) still do this! The local chapters have to hold dances, and at least one of those a year has to be a formal: http://usadance.org/chapters/find-a-local-chapter/

You know what I wish we still had? Balls.

Like formal balls from fairytails. Instead of going to a club or a bar, you would go to a ballroom. There’d be music and dancing, and everyone could wear fancy clothes. There could be masquerades, where you could meet new people and reveal your real identity at the end of the night. There could be gay/lesbian balls and gothic balls and space fantasy balls. Just, formal balls. 

Jupiter and Io

js

I had an interview today and I totally rocked this question:

Interviewer: How would you explain DNA to an 8 year old?

Me: I would tell them that DNA is like Legos. Like four different colored legos. Individually, they can't do much, but when you build them in a certain order, you can make different things, like a house or a tree or little lego people. It's the same in your body. Four different DNA molecules fit together to create the unique you.

Interviewer: *brief pause* That's a really good answer.

Me: Thank you. I like Legos and science.

prayer circle for elder scrolls 6

De-automation is a thing | Robohub

We tend to assume that automation is a process that continues – that once some human activity has been automated there’s no going back. That automation sticks. But, as Paul Mason pointed out in a recent column that assumption is wrong.

Mason gives a startling example of the decline of car-wash robots, to be replaced by, as he puts it “five guys with rags”. Here’s the paragraph that really made me think:

“There are now 20,000 hand car washes in Britain, only a thousand of them regulated. By contrast, in the space of 10 years, the number of rollover car-wash machines has halved –from 9,000 to 4,200.”

The reasons, of course, are political and economic and you may or may not agree with Mason’s diagnosis and prescription (as it happens I do). But de-automation – and the ethical, societal and legal implications – is something that we, as roboticists, need to think about just as much as automation.

Several questions come to mind:

are there other examples of de-automation? is the car-wash robot example atypical, or part of a trend? is de-automation necessarily a sign of something going wrong? (would Mason be so concerned about the guys with rags if the hand car wash industry were a well-regulated industry paying decent wages to its workers, and generating tax revenues back to the economy?)

Postcards that were anti-women-voting, circa 1900s through 1920